If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.

Thought is the seed of action.

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile.